Kenya is a Country of surprises and very interesting dynamics. After the August 2022 elections a rapture, something akin to an Apocalypse has gripped the Kenyan polity in a tight and unrelenting embrace. If you speak privately to most on the winners’ side they will candidly admit they do not know how they won, just as a majority on the losers’ side do not know how they lost this election. I had the unenviable occasion to meet in an informal gathering one of the key honchos from the winner’s camp and I must admit I was thoroughly abashed, but also riled by their prognosis of the events leading up to the announcement at Bomas.
The discussion went like a commentary of events that take place in an auction house. Never mind the bizarre incident in Westlands in December when an Asian couple lost everything they had toiled for, all their life, following a rude visit by an auctioneer and his goons. Just about everybody who cares felt angered by this broad daylight destruction and robbery. Only that couple can tell how they felt when they saw goons mow down their house to smithereens without the slightest sympathy.
As I listened to the winners’ tale I could not help draw a parallel with what happens to seized items like those from the Asian couple once they get to the auction floor. Because of the violence that characterizes auctioneer attacks some goods are completely damaged, some are broken others defaced, and many more are deformed and in many instances end up incomplete or impaired. The story I heard that night about the events at Bomas confirmed the idea that there is such a thing as ‘the law of unintended consequences’ something I learned from a 2016 TED Talk my friend Jeremiah Owiti shared in a group we both belong.
The winners, though all the time posturing as pious Christians on the outside, were in actual fact dyed in the wool full life and blood members of the ‘election mafia’ – armed to the teeth with a retinue of goons local, virtual, physical but also foreign. The other side had boasted that they had the ‘deep state’ on their side and were not worried about victory. I am told, to join the super mafia; one has to kill a human being to acquire a membership license, a principle not too distant from the stuff our election mafia have perfected and both camps had the marks and DNA of Mafioso each time they climbed the podium to speak. The ‘winners’ say it is God that handed them victory – that it is thanks to their incessant prayers – but they also quickly add that the ‘losers’ were not serious and that Baba their competitor was lied to by his handlers, who excelled in chest-thumping heroics, juvenile antics and a bloated sense of confidence. It is thus easy to say that one of the consequences of their prayers was to lull their competitors to sleep on the job, quite unintended is you ask me. The ‘winners’ surprisingly also accept that beating their opponent was no mean feat, that in their view Baba of 2022 was at his strongest and that getting the ‘votes’ to ‘beat’ him was something close to a miracle! That too confirms that whereas they prayed for a weak Baba to beat quite the opposite was the consequence, that Baba put up a very strong show and yet the adage that God works in mysterious ways, was however yet to come, because IEBC quite unintentionally just decided to split and get embroiled in an imbroglio that delivered the coveted seat to the winners – another unintended consequence from the ‘woke god’ of Kenya Kwanza.
The IEBC split which was 4:3 should have taken things to Baba’s side but quite the opposite and unintended (By the Baba brigade) happened. Of course, the miraculous 4:3 IEBC and the 7:0 Supreme Court with all their parables confounded even the ‘best believers’ – in this age of reason. The Supreme Court Judges listened to Baba’s prayers and all of them quickly dismissed the prayers to have the election nullified with choice phrases, ‘Hot air’; ‘wild goose chase’ etc., and this they did with the zeal of class four pupils, an outcome that was quite unintended if you ask the losers camp.
At the time of writing this article, a full four months after the election, a whistleblower report surfaced that has since painted an interesting picture of what the divided Commission seemed keen to never let the public know. But how can we trust a whistle blower, many on the winner’s side are asking? Let me answer this by paraphrasing Indonesian President Yudu Yuno, “if we can trust electoral commissioners who cannot count, or Judges and police who work in cahoots with criminals or people responsible for safeguarding state assets who raid banks – in short – the mafia, why should we not listen to this whistleblower?” The whistleblower has been told he should have presented his evidence at the Supreme Court even as some ‘criminal’ nay Mafia from DCI seeks to establish the truth about who visited whose house between Chebukati and Raila at the height of the election dispute. The 2022 elections in Kenya fits the description offered by one eloquent Singaporean legislator who on the floor of their parliament lamented that, “we should not confuse auctions for elections”, he went on “… elections will become auctions where parties compete to be more generous than the others, offering what it can do to voters by raiding the banks as happens in countries richer than us…” something akin to a census of who is more generous than the other. Just that some parties took their generosity a notch higher if the smiles from the IEBC Chair at his retirement party and the zeal of the 7 Judges is any barometer worthy of mention. I single the body language of the IEBC chair and the 7 Judges because the server, portal and anything held in them are too damaged like happens with all goods seized by the auctioneer and his goons.
Kenyans should not feel the need to get trapped in a vicious cycle of guilt, grief and grievance in perpetuity, as some have been doing, consequently, though unintended as Jero would put it, whenever it appears like all is lost, possibilities and permutations not anticipated are opened. Take the 1/- reduction in fuel prices, eat GMO maize when it hits town (there are sure 1000 ways to die, as Moses Kuria offers), borrow 500/- from the Hustler Fund and get used to the fact that the country is moving on with a president and an opposition leader who don’t seem to know how they won or lost. Isn’t that the beauty of Kenyan elections?
